Learning MLK

Black National Anthem

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.

Written by James Weldon Johnson (1899), music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1900)


When I was a little girl, though I suspect younger than my two ladybugs, to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and legacy, my family would spend the afternoon at a black church listening to people who'd lived the Civil Rights era, talking about about our history and the life of this man, and singing and clapping and dancing to some incredible church music and old Negro spirituals.  We were meant to reflect, consider, uplift, and rise, rise, rise above what our people, African-American people had endured in our own country.  A suffering that weighed heavily in the story of my immediate family.  This was not the story of just my ancestors, but of my people, my family, my father and mother and uncles and grands and greats.  It was not the past.  It was the ever-fluid present.

The emotion was so visceral, so intense in those moments that I was often embarrassed and humiliated by the heaviness.  I was "one of the only's," "the Cosby" at my school (calling it largely white would understate it).  That my father and mother were well-educated and had good jobs and provided for us well above even the national average allowed others to define us as "past all that."  But we weren't.  We aren't.  That our experience as middle class, educated, law abiding, good neighbors seemed beyond the norm was just the start of the misunderstanding.  That Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was still being debated as a national holiday confused the young me.  That I celebrated in a church full of African-Americans and very few others hit it home.  This was my cross to bear.  Everyone else got to have the day off.

I supposed that my white friends were spending the day shopping or watching TV, hanging out, while the weight of my people and really the future of our nation, felt like it rested on my shoulders, or ours, as we endured to keep the memory, the truth, and the history alive.  I wanted everyone to be considering Martin Luther King, Jr. in the same way I was.  As a man, a true person, not just an idea, who lived and breathed among us, the same air I was breathing now, and who saw severe racism and institutional injustice and wanted it changed.  I felt burdened in a way different than my parents and their parents had because, according to so many who "don't see color" I was not living the outright barbaric terrorism of the times before the Civil Rights era and was living in a nearly all white community, proof to so many that things had changed.  But I still felt racism's sting in the subtlest of ways and much of it was internalized.  I still felt that it was mine to prove that we were equal, alike, multidimensional and multifaceted. 

It has been an interesting lesson for my husband and me as we teach our children who are biracial and bicultural  about this very particular man from this very particular moment and then open up the discussion to the greater topics of racism and equality, tolerance and acceptance.  They are so young and still at an age where they see the differences but do not have cultural references as to what those differences mean to some people.  Because I experienced that sense of other, I have been both protective of their feelings as such and have also opened the dialogue before their questions about otherness have even arisen.  Since they were very small, they have seen both of our families either in person or via Skype.  My husband speaks French with them and they see him speaking with his friends and family only in French.  We have looked at the map and the globe to discover just "how close and how far" we are to where Papa grew up.  We have visited with my parents and family full of aunts, uncles, and cousins down South in Virginia, Washington, DC, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas.  When we lived in Barbados, they saw what looked to them like a thriving nation where black and white people worked along side one another, where they saw many more people of color in positions of power, where racism was, of course,  in play, as it is everywhere, but where they were not isolated because of their racial make up, where they were, in fact, part of the majority.  They learned there about the East Indians and Chinese in the Caribbean through the friendships they made, and though they certainly asked questions about where folks came from, it was more a curiosity of geography than fear or confusion about race.

We have made it clear through our friendships and relations and the way we speak about all people that intolerance based on color, creed, religion, or sexual orientation will not be accepted in our home.  They have never said they wished they were not black.  Have never said they don't believe themselves to be beautiful.  Have never said that boys are smarter than girls, that white is better than black, that something is a girl game or a boy color or only for one group or another.  We talk about other peoples' customs and religions, even practicing some of the holiday customs and going to services when we can to demonstrate how all people are just striving for the same goals for their families.  And yet, when the specifics of the pre-Civil Rights era come up, I am taken back to that pain. 

As they have begun to learn the very cursory history and stories they are shocked.  If the separate water fountains and segregated schools are enough to burn their cheeks and hurt their hearts, imagine how they were brought to silence, sucking the insides of their cheeks, when I told them that Grandma and Grandpa had grown up, been little kids, just as they were now, and had lived this abject racism and in the case of my parents, poverty.  That Grandma and Grandpa and their brothers and sisters and so many other families and children just like them could not look away from it, rather had to live it and breathe it every day of their lives.  That their lives, in the minds of many, institutionalized in the country they called home, were not as valuable as the lives of others.  They see the absolute injustice right away and struggle and fumble for words.  It is not an abstraction talked about as if a bygone era, but a tangible truth for people they love and hold dear.  Because they still see us all as equal, they are just unable to comprehend.  This is how it hurts.  As the true terror and violence of that time comes to light for them, they will need the strength to endure and to forgive and to continue the legacy of a real, live man who gave his life in that struggle.  For them, a real, live man who looks like Grandpa, for whom their eyes sparkle and who is loved infinitely.

Both girls are extremely empathic and feel for others so deeply and compassionately.  I feel so lucky that we are the same in that way.  But they, as I long ago, cannot define how it hurts, just feel the lumps in their throats, the flush of their cheeks, the knot in their hearts and they weep.  They have cried for friends that "would not be our friends if the brown and the white could not be together."  The oldest has a dear girlfriend who said she'd just have to be in jail because she loved her friend so and would not put up with that nonsense.  I loved this comment more than I realized because it keeps returning to me, to my heart.  I love it because during those MLK celebrations of my youth, I would have loved a professing of love and commitment such as that from someone who "didn't have to," was able to choose her commitment to the rights of others when the privilege was hers.

I was a young person and am now a grown woman.  What I shared is not shame but the real visceral pain of that history, of what separation, exclusion, divisiveness of any kind does not only to us on a global scale, but what it does just to our own individual selves. We miss the true evolution of ourselves--physically, emotionally, spiritually, nationally, internationally, globally.  We miss transcendence if we cannot "lift every voice and sing."  I am working hard to keep that love in mine.  I hope as we celebrate the man and his actions, we each make a commitment to ourselves and our actions. 


(c)  Copyright 2014.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.